The Ear-o-Smart is a pair of health-monitoring smart earrings

Developers of ‘the world’s first smart earring’ are hoping to raise over $30,000 on the Kickstarter crowd-funding website as part of a vision to “take fitness monitoring to the next level”. With most fitness and activity tracking devices typically worn on the wrist, developers of the Ear-o-Smart earring believe the wearable electronics market is missing a trick. The Ear-o-Smart earring from Canadian start-up BioSensive Technologies connects to a smartphone with Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology and monitors heart rate, calories, and activity level.

Sure, there are high-tech bracelets out there that can show you texts and reminders, but you’re more of an earrings gal anyway, and you like fitness bands better than smartwatches. Ear-o-Smart is a pair of smart earrings that can take the place of both health bands and heart-rate-monitoring earbuds like LG’s and SMS Audio’s. These accessories have the technology to monitor not only your heart rate, but also calories burned and activity levels by shining an LED to your flesh and measuring the light reflected by your blood. They then transmit bursts of data via Bluetooth to an iPhone or an Android smartphone. The earrings’ Kickstarter page claims they have the potential to be more accurate than fitness bands, since they don’t move around and lay flush against your skin. But before you can see for yourself if that’s true, Ear-o-Smart’s developers have to raise $26,500, so they can work on improving its battery life. A minimum pledge of $110 will get you a pair of the simple white earrings you see above, while $133 will get you a kit that lets you create your own design. BioSensive Technologies, the Canadian startup behind the project, hopes to come up with the first batch of hardware by February and to start shipping to backers by June 2015.